11/13/07 Homeless Rate Drops 12 Percent

The plight of the homeless seems especially poignant during the holiday season. Countless individuals throughout our nation will be volunteering their time in a variety of capacities this Thanksgiving to help feed those to whom a warm meal is a rarity. Some volunteers might gather donations , others deliver baskets, serve dinner or even provide entertainment. Coupled with the joy these volunteers are certain to receive from the act of giving are some encouraging statistics recently released by the US Department of Housing, or HUD. Remarkably the number of homeless people has dropped nearly 12 percent since last year. While advocates for the homeless site the fact that the chronic homeless are hard to count because of their mobility, they do attribute much of the new success in getting people off the streets to HUD's efforts in shifting resources from emergency shelters to more permanent housing facilities. Long term permanent housing has helped break the cycle of homelessness yet HUD estimates that on any given night last January 754,000 were homeless.